Demystifying the Science and Art of Political Polling - By Mark Blumenthal

January 10, 2006

Three New Polls

CBS News, ABC/Washington Post and Gallup/CNN/USAToday each released new surveys over the last 24 hours. The three polls each take in-depth looks at a variety of issues, including the Alito nomination, the NSA wiretaps, the Iraq War and the Abramoff/ethics story. The latter appear to be contributing to declining approval or support for the US Congress seen in all three surveys. The polls also help to resolve our speculation in December (here, here and here) about about recent trends in the Bush job approval rating. The surveys show now significant increase - and possibly a slight decline - since early December. I want to quickly share some links and point out some findings of note to some of the topics we've been following.

First, the available links as of this posting. As usual, the sponsoring news agencies are releasing the results piecemeal.

This morning's Washington Post also covers the corruption/Abramoff questions (story, results) and also provides the demographic and partisans breakdown of the sample. UPDATE: A 1/11 article in the Post covers the results on terrorism and President Bush and the results page has been updated accordingly.

I assume that we will have more online postings in the next 24 hours, and will update this post accordingly.

As always, these surveys ask a variety of different questions on each subject and typically take a slightly different approach to each. As always, consumers are likely to get the best read by looking at all the results rather than depending on just one source. I cannot do the extensive analysis much justice with a quick blog post.

However, there are a few results that are probably of interest to MP readers. The first is the latest read on the Bush job trend in the Bush job ratings. Readers will recall that the December surveys all showed small increases over November, but there was inconsistency over whether the Bush approval rating had continued to rise into the mid 40s in mid to late December. These surveys show no evidence of any such increase. These results bolster the argument that the previous ABC/Post and Diageo/Hotline polls were collectively a bit of an outlier (or at least the latter was as per Franklin).

[CORRECTION: I compiled the original table above with far too much haste. The version now in place corrects several errors. My apologies.]

There are some other intriguing differences among the polls that catch my eye, but I'll have to update on them later as time allows.

"Professional pollster Mark Blumenthal started Mystery Pollster to provide better interpretation of polling results and methodology... offers much needed help to Political Wire readers" - Political Wire